A Case Modders Guide
The Quest for 1 Gigahertz

By: Björn Johansson

Supplier: TJ Computer, Sweden

Introduction - In my previous over clocking article I ran my PIII 700 at 994 MHz. As I mentioned there that I was curious about if I could hit higher than 1 GHz with extra cooling.

At that time it ran without any major problems at that speed. But after stressing the system during several hours with the cover on it started to hang. So I decided to put some extra cooling in it and see if it could get some more juice out of it!

First of all I had to think of what I wanted for kind of cooling in it. I had three options: peltier elements, water-cooling and air-cooling.

Peltier-cooling - If you want extreme cooling a peltier can be what you’re looking for. Basically it is a very small element (!) that gets cooler way below zero. On the other hand it gets really hot on the other side of the element and you’ll have take away that heat with air-cooling or similar. My biggest boggle was not the CPU getting to hot but the graphic card and the chipset on the motherboard. Also I noted that the heat stayed in the case. So peltiers was not an option for me. The price for a peltier element is around 20 $. If you are interested in peltiers The Heatsink Guide have an article about it. The article can be found here.

Water-cooling - Here you put a small refrigerator into your case. But again this is not an option for me because my case is too small. This technique is more expensive than the others (except if you strip your freezer on some stuff ;). If you want to know more overclockers.com have an FAQ about water-cooling with some links to suppliers. Click here to get directly to the FAQ.

Air-cooling - To get rid of the heat in the case I ended up with deciding for fans. There are two problems with fans as I see it. The first is that your system never gets cooler than the temperature in the case/room. The other thing is that too many or “wrong” fans can be really noisy. Primary there is the size and the speed of the fan that determines if it’s going to be noisy or not. The bigger fan, the higher noise level and higher rotations per minute means higher level of noise. Another consideration is how much air the fan sucks or blows. This is measured in CFM, the higher the better. Please note that it will probably be noisier as the CFM rises. The good sides are that is safer than the peltier and the water-cooling solution. You don’t want a water accident inside of your case.